Death By A Thousand Tweets

The next time you complain that your working hours are just way too long, and pulling 18 hour shifts at the office is going to be the death of you, perhaps you will be able to sympathize with resident writer for Japanese comedy website Omokoro, Sebuyama. Just what is his predicament, actually? Well, when Omokoro hit 10,000 followers on Twitter, the chief editor asked Sebuyama to return to the office at around 10pm, and requested for him to research into the kind of tweets that has the highest chance of being retweeted.

Naturally, Sebuyama accepted the task at hand, and this particular social experiment that captured the attention of netizens in Japan has resulted in Sebuyama sitting in nothing but his underpants right in front of his computer, having nearly a century of clothespins stuck to his body as well. His editor Harajuku’s proposal in going about this research is to perform an experiment, where Sebuyama’s personal twitter account (numbering 2,131 followers then) is required to tweet about whatever he thinks will generate attention, and this experiment ends when Sebuyama achieves a total of 1,000 retweets or more.

Blindness in the test is ensured, as Twitter followers will not know whether there is an experiment going on, until the 1,000 retweets goal is achieved, and Sebuyama must not leave the office until then. Totally nuts! How did all the clothespins end up on his body then? He decided to tweet: “I’ll stick clothespins on my body equal to the number of times this is retweeted and post a picture online.” After hitting the send button, he slept for 2 hours thereabouts and awoke to a “Mission Accomplished” situation – his last tweet had been retweeted 1815 times. At least this is something light to end the last day of the working week with. Remember, you read it here first – bosses have this new maneuver known as “Death By A Thousand Tweets”.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: Twitter